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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 42 | December 1999


Collecting and safeguarding oral traditions

Kevin Bradley & Khon Kaen

Kevin Bradley with one of the conference organisers in Khon Kaen

Khon Kaen, in Thailand’s northeast, rarely gets a detailed mention in the guidebooks other than to remark on its centrality to the Thai silk trade. However, woven into the social fabric of the region is a diversity of cultures that together produce the complex and innovative life of the Isan region. The vitality of the oral cultures amongst many of these peoples made Khon Kaen an ideal venue for the ‘Collecting and Safeguarding Oral Traditions’ satellite meeting of the General Conference of IFLA, 16–19 August 1999.

Present at the discussions were representatives from many countries and cultures with various perspectives on oral traditions and their documentation. There were librarians, anthropologists, archivists, activists, educators, technologists and oral historians—not only from normally dominant Europe, but also from Africa (especially the Francophone states), Southeast Asia, South America, USA, Canada, Australia and the Pacific.

The astonishing availability of affordable digital technology has brought the issue of preservation of electronic items to the forefront of thinking in collections throughout the world. Sound recordings have been routinely made in electronic form for at least 50 years, but the format changes of the new media have made many people all too aware of their fragility. Copying the old recordings to the new formats has revealed to curators many problems with ageing tapes; and the plethora of ever-emerging digital formats has made the risks of format obsolescence painfully obvious. Not only does a collection manager have to worry about whether the item is suffering from physical degradation and breakdown, they must also consider the availability of machines to play the collection.

Kevin Bradley and Dietrich Schüller jointly ran a workshop on the technical aspects of audio presentation. Kevin is manager of Digital and Audio Preservation Resources (DAPR) at the National Library of Australia; Dietrich is director of the world’s oldest sound archive (currently celebrating its 100th anniversary), Phonogrammarchiv Vienna, and chair of the International Association of Sound Archives (IASA) Technical Committee of which both are members. One-quarter of the four day meeting was spent on the problems of sound archiving, storage and handling, transfer from analogue tapes, field equipment and recording techniques, concepts in digital audio, and why sound archivists dislike bit rate reduction for archival storage. CD-recordable material and how to manage its use in the sound archive, and comparisons between it and other digital formats were also discussed.

The long-term life of the recorded collections of oral material are determined by the immutable laws of physics, but decisions about their purpose and use are governed by social and cultural concerns. Technological decisions must incorporate the cultural perspective. The keynote address by The Honourable Professor John Waiko, Papua New Guinea’s Minister for Education, Research, Science and Technology, read by the urbane vice chair of the IFLA Professional Committee, Ralph Manning, argued for equity between written and oral cultures, not only in PNG’s vast diversity, but in post-colonial international interaction. This theme resonated in many of the discussions that followed, as the importance of the orally transmitted cultures of many countries was strongly avowed. Speakers found links between the new transmission technologies and the oral cultures of many peoples, Raphael Ndiaye in his ‘Oral traditions: From origins to digitisation’, and Steve Cisler in ‘Beyond Print’ were just two.

The Research Institute of North-eastern Arts and Culture at the Mahasarakham University provided a chance for the meeting to examine a collection of material that documented oral traditions, with delegates subsequently treated to a display of music and dance provided by students and local musicians. The university encourages the study of the vernacular arts of the region and little distinction is drawn locally between the exponents of the forms, whether they be students or local villagers. The powerful drumming and acrobatic dancing left no doubt about the commitment of either.

The meeting opened a dialogue between many different cultures about common areas of concern and this will doubtless continue electronically long after the sound of the music has faded. However, the sharing of culture, knowledge and information can best be symbolised in the boisterous dance at Mahasarakan University as Africans, Pacific Islanders, European and Asian participants were drawn onto the floor to add their own cultural interpretation to the beautiful and skilful dancers of Isan.

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